Down The Rabbit Hole

Mr. White snapped the pocket watch closed.

The sound struck the tiles and came back clean.

The same sound echoed in the church while the organist cycled the bridal chorus a second time.

Forty-two minutes.

The amount of time before the groundskeepers lowered his father's coffin and moved to the next plot.

In March, Sophie's side of the bed stayed cold.

By August, the children stopped leaving voicemails.

On Christmas Eve, Sophie took the rabbit from the cedar shavings and carried it to her car.

***

"Shit. I'm late."

The alley gate saved two minutes.

He cut across the lawn, his shoes crunching down on the frost.

The hutch blocked the shortcut. He shoved it aside, and the wood splintered.

The earth underneath opened into a cavity.

White stopped. He dangled the watch over the centre by its chain.

The chain slipped. He braced, expecting the crack of glass.

Silence.

He leaned his weight over the edge of the hole.

The cold rising from it was not weather. It was architecture.

He tilted forward.

Then he fell.

The lawn peeled upward, rotating the shed and the dead flowerbeds on their axis.

The winter sky sheared away into a slow descent.

The draft traded the scent of frost for the sting of iodine.

Thick roots split the tunnel walls, flattening into shelves of loam as he fell.

They displayed a stack of untorn recital tickets thawing in the mud. A tenth-anniversary box wrapped in pink ribbon, and towers of leather planners fused solid by black ice.

The descent terminated at a long banquet table, its linen tablecloth calcified.

Shattered bone china jutted out in every direction, and a tarnished teapot split at the seams, its final pour stalled into a solid, brown spear.

Beside it, a hairless mouse twitched. Its skin stretched like parchment over a heaving ribcage, one pink paw frozen to a sugar spoon.

At the head, a man in a collapsed top hat sat in a high-backed chair. Playing cards pierced his scalp, red baked into his hairline.

He uncoiled and dragged his head around to face White. His spine cracked like dry kindling, and he tore his arm from the chair, leaving a strip of grey meat fused to the armrest.

"When she woke up," the man said.

White pushed himself off the frozen dirt. "Who?"

"The girl." He stared at the dying mouse. "Her waking up was our death sentence," he snapped.

White paused, scraping the permafrost from his suit cuffs. "Who are you? Where am—"

"—You don't remember me?"

"No. I don't think—"

"I'm the Stark, Raving, Mad consequence of a hundred and sixty-one years behind a locked door. But you may call me SRM."

"I'm not doing this." White slammed a palm against his breast, clawing into the pockets until the inner seam ripped. "Where's my watch?"

"It's where it needs to be," SRM replied.

"Enough with this bollocks. I'm late." White backed away from the ice.

"Visiting hours are almost up. I need to get to the hospital because I'm—"

SRM caught the trailing breath.

“Late.”

“Late.”

“Late.”

"What has a bed but never sleeps?"

always forward

never back

seldom returning for what it takes.

"Stop," White said. “Aren’t you listening to a word I’m saying?”

He dragged his thumbs down the lapels of his coat.

"The answer is a river. It flows one way. I have played your game. Now step aside."

“A river.

That’s a child's metaphor.

Strip the water away, White.

Tell me what you are actuallyrowning in.”

White stilled.

What has a bed but never sleeps.

Sophie's side of the bed. Cold since March.

Always forward. Never back.

The recital tickets. Untorn.

Seldom returning for what it takes.

His father's watch. Still ticking somewhere.

He pressed his knuckles into the frozen table.

"Time," he said.

He opened his mouth to say more, but every defense would have been a confession.

"The great philosopher," SRM said.

"I answered. Now, step aside."

"Your obsession ground them into decimals," SRM said.

White's shoulders locked.

"Do not speak about my family."

The permafrost cracked outward from his chair in a clean line.

"Your wedding day," he said. "Third pew from the front. They thought you were talking to yourself."

White said nothing.

"You were the only one who could see me up there," SRM said. "Until you chose not to."

The dormouse had been mid-sentence since Alice left.

SRM lifted it by its tail and swallowed it whole.

The words spilled out of SRM in a sweeping arc:

you had everything 　　　　

Sophie　　

the kids 　　　　　　　　　　　　

a warm house 　　　　

and you watched them disappear 　　　　　　　　

counting 　　　　　　　　　　　　

counting 　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　

counting

time only eats

and you are out of currency.

White pushed back from the table. His legs did not move.

"I answered you," White rasped. "The game is over."

"The game is the only thing keeping your heart beating," SRM said.

The air split. Something from the other side bled through.

"…bilateral breath sounds diminished, sats dropping, suction catheter now…"

The linen went hospital white.

"We were friends," White whispered.

"I didn't leave you. I just... ran out of room on the page."

"You ran out of pulse," SRM corrected.

The garden flatlined.

"…pressure sixty over forty, vasopressors now, he's in freefall…"

"Sophie." His arm reached across the table.

"She isn't at the ward, White," SRM said. "She's behind the glass."

…charging to two hundred, clear…

"A punctual corpse," SRM said. "At last."

The banquet table lost its geometry.

Then it appeared.

S G

M N

I I

L

Suspended in the dead air.

Bodyless.

It assembled itself around the smile: a striped cat, its eyes two unblinking surgical lamps.

SRM did not look up. "This table is not set for you, Cat."

The Cat drifted toward White.

…visual stability compromised…

It found him.

"There he is," the Cat said. "He finally stopped running."

"I need to reach Sophie—"

"She's been reaching for you for twenty years. She got tired."

…switch to manual ventilation…

The monitor flatlined.

The Cat raised one paw, and the sound cut out.

Time did not stop; it developed a fever.

SRM's head turned toward the Cat for the first time.

"You are not permitted—"

"Permitted is a word for men who still have a pulse to bargain with," the Cat said.

SRM was quiet for a moment. Not defeated. Finished.

He turned to White one last time.

Then he lifted a hand and came apart like a held breath, like a room exhaling after a hundred and sixty-one years behind a locked door.

The cold he left behind was different.

It was the cold of an empty chair.

The Cat drifted across the table. Nothing that was already broken broke further.

It stopped close enough that White could feel the chill of its breath.

The grin was gone.

"You didn't fall, White. You built it. One missed dinner at a time."

"I was working," White rasped. "For them."

"You whittled yourself down to a timetable and called it a life," the Cat said. "And now you are exactly on time."

Everything was dissolving. Edges first. Then the middle.

“What… what’s happening?”

"You're late, White Rabbit," the Cat said. "Late to the only appointment that ever mattered."

"…cardiorespiratory instability… increasing voltage…"

"No." White's fingers closed around nothing. "Sophie."

"The room is waiting," the Cat said. "Don't be late."

The garden imploded.

The smell of iodine deepened.

White's eyes opened to a grid of pale ceiling tiles, repeating into the distance.

Fluorescent lights hummed.

A plastic tube occupied his throat, breathing for him.

Through the curve of the oxygen mask, they were there. Sophie wore the face of someone who had already said goodbye and was only here to confirm it.

She held a small cardboard box of his office effects.

The desk calendar.

The ball-point pens.

A photograph of the four of them, still in its frame, that had lived on his desk and never made it home.

Beside her, the children had made themselves small against the wall.

Tom stared at the linoleum, shoulders hunched, braced for a blow that had already landed.

"He's awake," a nurse whispered. There was no joy in it.

Sophie leaned in. Her hand found his. The weight of her hand reached him. Not the warmth.

She didn't tell him it would be okay.

She didn't tell him he was early.

"We have to let you go, Rob," she said, her voice breaking against the click of the ventilator.

White's arm moved toward her.

But the monitor ran its final countdown.

Tick.

Sophie's face blurred into white petals.

Tock.

The darkness rose from the floor.

Tick.

He did not check his watch.

Tock.

He was looking at his children.

BIO: Ashley Mangtani is a UK writer whose work explores social collapse and the roles people inhabit in moments of crisis, often in stories shaped by inevitability and loss. Blending literary realism with speculative fiction, slipstream, and dark irony, his work has appeared or is forthcoming in Litro, Washington Square Review, CommuterLit, Mercurius Magazine, and Mobius: The Journal of Social Change. Read more at ashleymangtanifiction.carrd.co

Follow on Social

Literary Garage: Storytelling with grit, heart, and no off-ramp.

© 2025. All rights reserved.

Connect

Follow us on Substack for updates and news

Special Features Editor and Warrior God: Michael Downing

Member IBPA